Albert Camus, Literature, and The Plague

This is the script of a video I prepared for the “Camus, Christ and COVID-19” event hosted by Christian Heritage Cambridge on 20 May 2020. I aim to address three questions:

• the place and importance of literature during a time of crisis such as COVID-19
• the meaning of Albert Camus’ story The Plague (he withdrew the title ‘novel’ for its second edition, preferring the more generic ‘récit’: story)
• the value of reading The Plague today

Albert Camus, Literature, and The Plague

It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to  represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.

This quotation from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe serves as the enigmatic epigraph to Albert Camus’s The Plague, one of the great stories by one of the finest authors of the twentieth century.

It is an epigraph as provocative as it is impish, throwing out a challenge to the reader: how will we receive this representation of a plague that never existed? And it stands as a question to us too: what are we to make of this fictional epidemic, we who are living through the real pandemic at the moment?

It is a question not only about Camus’s story, however, but about the whole institution of literature, whose bread and butter it is precisely to represent what really exists by that which does not.

So in introducing Camus’s story I feel that I first need to say a few words on the very idea of reading literature as a way to explore and come to terms with COVID-19, because it’s an important plank of our response to the current situation that the mainstream media is, I think, largely ignoring. I will then briefly introduce The Plague itself, addressing some common misconceptions about the text, before wrapping up with some suggestions as to why it is an important text for us to be reading at the moment.

 

An apologia for literature

So let’s begin where Camus’s begins in his epigraph, with the question of representation, and with an apologia for literature.

That such a thing should be necessary speaks eloquently about the journey our society has been on in relation to the arts. The idea that literature and stories are to be relegated to the category of “entertainment” and reserved for those who like that sort of thing is a curiously and peculiarly modern delusion that is both blind to the power of “entertainment” to shape outlooks and mentalities, and blind the ubiquity of stories in our everyday existence.

We can no more live without stories than we can live without shelter or sustenance. Without them, we cease to be human. Stories are not just trifles we read to amuse ourselves, they are the lens we look through to make sense of ourselves. It is what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and others have called our “narrative identity”: You show me what stories you tell yourself, and I’ll show you who you are.

 

Literary worlds

So what is a text like The Plague? Let me offer you one response: it is a world. Not our everyday world, but sufficiently like it to be recognisable, and sufficiently different to be challenging. It is a world to which we are invited to travel and where can make our home for the duration of our reading.

It is a world that takes us out of our everyday existence in order to return us to it with new understandings, new feelings, new vicarious experiences. As Camus notes in an essay on capital punishment, quoting Mme de Lafayette, the novel is “une façon de surmonter un sort difficile en lui imposant une forme” (“a way of overcoming a difficult fate by imposing a form on it”).  That is what literature does: it gives form to experience.

If our only experience is that of our day-to-day world then we will be unlikely to question that world. Why would we, when we have no sense that there could be any alternative to it? But literature puts us for a few hours in a different world, such that when we return to our own we find that it was not inevitable after all but just one among a number of possiblities. This sense that things could be different, this inkling of the contingency of the status quo, is a precious intuition that, if it is lost, makes sheep of all of us and wolves of some of us. And literature has the power to show us this contingency of our own world, our own assumptions, our own agendas and goals.

And leaving the comforting shores of our everyday reality in order to set forth into literary worlds not our own is not just entertainment; it is closer to an act of civic duty. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t recognise it’s in water because it has never been out of it, we can’t see the everyday world right in front of our eyes for what it is, we can’t see its assumptions, its quirks, or its prejudices, unless we have something to compare it to.

Of course literature is not the only way we can learn from others’ experiences, walk in their shoes, and live in their worlds. But how many times, in life, does someone let us into their private world with the candour and depth we find in a well-written novel? How often in life do we know someone so well that we feel what it’s like to be in their world? Three, four, five times if we’re lucky. And who are those people? In all likelihood they are people who we meet, most probably people in our social circle or in our family, who speak our language, who broadly share our interests and opinions, in short: who are already like us. That’s a small pool of experience from which to fish for wisdom in a globalised world.

 

Learning to ski

So how should we characterise this experience of literature? We are no doubt familiar with the skiing analogy: if you want to learn to ski it’s no good reading a book about it. You need to strap on your skis and take to the slopes. A book can give you head knowledge about skiing, but taking to the slopes gives you the bodily skill of skiing that no book can teach you.

So I want to ask today: is reading literature like reading a book about how to ski: a dump of information with no real-life application? Or is it like skiing: a practical exercise rather than a theoretical contemplation?

Think about it this way:

• When we cry at a book do we cry theoretical tears, or real tears?
• When we are moved by a book, do we feel theoretical emotions, or real emotions?
• When we see life differently after reading a novel do we experience a theoretical change in perspective, or a real one?

In each case, these experiences are real: neurologically, affectively, existentially. They are as real as any other tears, emotions or changes in perspective we experience, no mor and no less.

A book about skiing is not skiing, because (if expert skiers will permit me a moment of reductive crudity) skiing is about staying on your feet and going down hill, and a book can’t recreate that experience. But a work of literature does not just represent life like a book about skiing represents skiing. No, literature participates in life, because life is about stories, about emotions, about relationships and understanding, and it is these very things that literature offers us, not some mere third person report about them.

To respond directly to Camus’s epigraph, then, it is reasonable to represent that which exists by that which does not, because reality is always already an inextricable amalgam of matter and meaning, physical creation and mental creation, things and the stories that make sense of them.

 

The Plague

So as we tighten our focus to Camus’s The Plague now, we do so in the knowledge that we are not detaching ourselves from the immediate concerns that surround us, but rather we are seeking to question and broaden our perspective on them to help shape the world in which we all live.

And we do so in the knowledge that we are enlisting the aid of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century to help us feel and experience what it is like to be a human being alive at the moment, and how to live, both individually and corporately, in this time of being-towards-virus.

Camus began writing The Plague in 1941, in the depths of the Second World War, and it was published two years after the War’s end in 1947 to huge initial success: selling 22,000 copies in just two weeks. To date over five million copies have been sold, many more no doubt in the last couple of months, and it has been translated into some thirty languages.

Camus himself was an existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, journalist, freedom fighter and football goalkeeper. He was an active member of the French Resistance, editing a resistance newspaper Combat during the Second World War, a commitment to struggle and solidarity that shows itself in the pages of The Plague.

Many people mis-read The Plague as a story of the absurd. (This is Alain de Botton’s mistake in a recent New York Times article on the text). Camus’ works can in fact be divided into two broad periods, the absurd and revolt, and on his own testimony The Plague is part of the second phase of revolt. What this means, concretely, is that we are mistaken to read it merely as a resignation to the meaninglessness of existence (which, as it happens, is not what Camus’s absurd is about anyway).

In a letter to Roland Barthes in 1955 Camus insists that the movement from The Stranger to The Plague is that from solitude to solidarity.

• The text itself is framed as an exercise in solidarity : Dr. Rieux writes his account “pour ne pas être de ceux qui se taisent” (“so as not to be among those who remain silent”). And in his chronicle he privileges the experience of the group over any particular individual, in a further gesture of solidarity.
• The journalist Rambert’s dramatic gesture solidarity when he decides to stay in Oran despite the opportunity to leave emblematises the town’s response to the plague: “je sais que je suis d’ici. Cette histoire nous concerne tous” (“I know that this is where I belong. This story concerns us all”). You wouldn’t find a line like that in The Stranger or in The Myth of Sisyphus.
• This is not the Camus of the absurd. This is the Camus of resistance and revolt.

So what is The Plague about? Camus himself says it functions on three levels:

• It is about the events as they are literally recounted
• It is about the German occupation of Paris
• and It is about human existence as a whole

 

What does The Plague have to say to us today?

And what does The Plague have to say to us today?

Much more, no doubt, than I can summarise in a short video like this one. As I have tried to explore elsewhere on this blog, Camus’s story also opens a number of fruitful avenues for further thinking:

• it shows how crises such as COVID-19 perform an apocalypse, revealing aspects of ourselves and our society that, for better and for worse, would otherwise remain veiled or invisible
• it shows us how modernity fills its whole horizon with the status quo to the extent of dismissing the thought that things could be radically different to how they currently are
• it shows how we try to fit new realities to existing expectations, and how disorientating it is when reality breaks or overflows those expectations
• it shows how a crisis messes with our understanding of time, and by extension how crucial is our understanding of time for our experience of the world
• it shows how we rely on statistics to give us a sense of the whole beyond our immediate experience, and it draws attention to the problems inherent in that reliance on the numerical
• it is also an invitation to us to listen to the other side: audi alteram partem. To be invited into the world of Oran under quarantine is not trivial. To understand what the world feels like to Rieux, or to Paneloux, helps us to appreciate and engage fruitfully with people who are not like us.
• It gives us a fresh perspective on our own time and place. The Plague is, in C. S. Lewis’s terms, and “old book”. It was not written from within our cultural moment, and it does not share our blind spots and prejudices. It has its own, to be sure, but they are not the same as ours. It therefore helps us to see our own times of COVID-19 at least in part with the perspective of an outsider: It triangulates our relationship to the contemporary news media.
• Finally, it fosters our self-understanding because, inevitably, we understand ourselves better through understanding others better. In the oft-quoted lines from Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.